Consumers are people too
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Peter Harrison, Innovation Manager, BrainJuicer® Labs
“Empathy, which literally translates as in feeling, is the capability to share another being’s emotions and feelings” (Wikipedia).
Creativity means balancing direction and freedom to achieve relevance and originality. To be creative we need to be in touch with our rational brain and our emotive mind. Traditional research, in particular quantitative, is very effective at providing sustenance for the rational mind enabling us to identify people and judge good ideas versus bad ones. However over reliance on the quantitative seldom provides a springboard for creativity and prevents research from telling human narratives. Rather than enabling you to feel what a person is like, it attempts to describe them by assigning labels. Researchers need to rebalance the emphasis to include a more intuitive understanding of the people under study.
We call this an ‘empathetic understanding’ and it is something many of the top actors use, although they would call it ‘getting into character’ or method acting. Consider Hollywood great Jack Nicholson who improvised one of the most famous lines in film history when he thrust his head through a door and shouted “Here’s Johnny!” in The Shining. This moment was entirely unscripted but both the quote and the image of his deranged face have become iconic symbols ever since. This is a perfect illustration of how an empathetic understanding can inspire extreme levels of creativity.
There is a lot we can learn from the acting profession about how actors get into character and channel this understanding into their creativity. When designing a new marketing initiative or writing a new insight, wouldn’t it be great if we were able to tap into what it means to be a particular person to inspire more exciting and relevant ideas?
For many quantitative researchers, graphs are a virtual second language that they rely on to communicate their findings. This has its place but can limit researchers and the actionability of findings as they are straitjacketed into communicating a factual message rather than delivering an empathetic understanding. To access a deeper, more human understanding of people we should help clients to get into character through pictures, videos and audio clips all of which provide a more emotive and less ‘rational’ portrayal of our target audience. The same applies to qualitative reports that are often decks full of bullet points.
When we see someone talking, their inclinations, body language and facial expressions all work together to provide a coherent picture that is more contextual and memorable than the written word or graph. Online we are witnessing conversations in which people increasingly rely on emoticons, explanation marks, acronyms (like lol) and capital letters to convey emotion otherwise missing in written communication. This is clearly an important part of communication for them but is generally missing in research reports. Meaning is not only derived from words but also other visual and audio cues that combine to deliver a powerful and coherent message.
This can move us from thinking about ‘consumers’ who buy Brand X to real people with everyday needs. This especially applies to projects such as segmentations – whose purpose is to identify groups of people and establish a platform from which to develop fresh new communication and product ideas. If we learn from Jack Nicholson that understanding a character is more than memorising the script but sensing who the character is and developing an emotive understanding of who they are, then the value of research will grow.
Luckily for researchers the rise of social media has meant that many people not only segment themselves (SAHM = stay at home mum on Mumsnet for example) they also share pictures, videos and hold conversations. This offers a goldmine of emotive content that researchers can use to support and illuminate their key messages, making it easier for readers (especially those not “fluent in graph”) to interpret them into something meaningful. Online we find the language they use tells a story in itself that can be masked when they’re asked to rate statements or add their thoughts in open-ended boxes.
Research methodologies, whether standalone or supplementary, are also increasingly better adapted to provide this kind of content. Ethnography as a discipline is being expanded to include more of this user-generated content – greatly reducing the price and duration. It is commonly held good practise in fiction writing to ‘show not tell’ as it’s considered more interesting and memorable. With the rise of camera-phones, the mobile internet and web-cams, respondents can now share with us visual snapshots of their lives and experiences frequently and inexpensively.
We created a new methodology called DigiViduals™, using existing knowledge about segments to program on-line search ‘bots’ which then go out to social media sites and return pictures, videos, music and products that reflect the lives of their target segment. The results add to our understanding by creating powerful image-based narratives that expand and deepen our appreciation of who these people are. For one consumer electronics company we ‘generated new insights that were then validated quantitatively and were found to be more relevant and fresher than their existing category insights derived from traditional research methods.
Some time ago the market research industry underwent the shift from ‘information is power’ to ‘knowledge is power’. The bar needs to be raised again – to create ‘empathetic understanding’. This shift in focus will mean the output is not just relevant and insightful but also exciting and inspiring. This will make it accessible to a broader audience, and by understanding people on a human, emotional level will enhance its role in the creative generation process. Advances in technology and people’s willingness to share their lives openly online provide the means for researchers to incorporate richer material and create a deeper connection and understanding of the people we are trying to learn about.
Posted: July 12th, 2010 | Author: Glen Dower | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: brainjuicer, Customer Champions, Peter Harrison, the marketing society | 3 Comments »
Glen,
I completely agree that consumers are people too and I do think that sometimes people forget this when categorising them with such an impersonal moniker. You may be interested in reading my call to ban the word consumer from all advertising briefs although you could argue that it should be opened out even further – http://ht.ly/2873V.
How do you get around the problem that more and more people have their information hidden on Facebook? Do you just go with what you can find, or do you do something else?
Hi Randall,
Facebook is just the tip of the social media iceberg! Try conducting social media searches – google has fourm and discussion searches or sites like scoopler.com or oneriot just search the social media space. Then there’s flickr, youtube and Twitter and specialist sites like kaboodle or mumsnet that are mines of information. The important thing to understand with social media is that we don’t need to understand each individual on it by looking at profiles in detail, and in many ways this poses more ethical questions, I prefer to look for themes across that run through discussions on particular sites or forums. Even on Facebook you can look for how conversations run in groups – for a good example of this there is a paper by Casteleyn, Mottart and Rutten on http://www.ijmr.com “How to use Facebook in your research”.
Thanks for the link Daniele – there seems to be an uprising against the “consumer” label!
I hope this helps!
Peter